Any marketer who has run a Google Ads campaign knows that the process of generating affordable leads at scale is an art form. First you have to get your Ad in front of the right people. This involves processes like researching the correct keywords, and identifying who your user persona is. After this, you have to invest time and effort into creating the optimum Ad copy that induces people to click on your Ad.

You then begin to worry about what I consider to be the hardest stage of the advertising process : Designing a Landing Page Experience.

After a prospect clicks on your Ad, their user experience will be the difference between a bounce and a conversion, you need to make sure it’s perfect. Unlike the first two stages, landing page optimisation cannot be automated. You need to optimise load times, write good copy, decide on an ideal CTA and run A/B tests. The worst part is that even after all of that Conversion Optimisation, over 90% of the prospects who click on your ad (and cost you precious ad spend) won’t convert. To combat this problem, a handful of pioneering advertisers are turning to new tools in the digital marketing space to make the post click optimization process more effective.

iKeva is a leading co-working space provider across five of India’s largest tech hubs: Bangalore, Chennai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. As the tech ecosystem in each of these cities has grown the demand for co-working spaces has increased dramatically. But as is expected with any growing industry increased demand has led to fierce competition. It has become increasingly difficult (not to mention expensive) for iKeva to generate leads because they face more competition while bidding for Google Ads. Before using chatbots, this trend resulted in a steep drop in ROI on their Ad spend.

Conversion rates remained stagnant in the 9% to 11% range while competition increased.

To maximize their ROI, iKeva’s marketing partner, GenYMedium, had two options at their disposal. They could either:

Try to reduce cost per click directly

Improve the quality of their landing page experience to make sure that their conversion rate kept pace with the growing cost per click.

Since the first approach (reducing cost per click) was largely contingent on factors which were out of their hands (i.e. the competition), GenY Medium went to the drawing board to overhaul iKeva’s landing page experience.

The Old Landing Page Experience

Before the switch to chatbots, iKeva’s Google Ads campaigns used two techniques to capture leads :

The Solution

Recognizing these problems, iKeva and GenY Medium worked with Tars to create a solution that could in their words “bridge the gap between click to call campaigns and forms.”

Together, we built a chatbot landing page that qualified and converted leads by asking them a simple series of questions (e.g. preferred product, phone number, email etc.)

The chatbot simulated the human feel of a click to call campaign but could run 24/7 like a lead capture form because it was automated and did not require additional manpower to run.

Within a few months, iKeva saw its conversion rate increase from 9-11% to 23-25%.

It also reduced their reliance on the human agents required to run a click-to-call campaign, and allowed them to run their ads in non-working hours when their competitors took their click-to-call campaigns offline and bidding competition was low, both of which saved them additional resources on top of their reduced cost per lead.

The Upshot

Chatbots in the context of PPC campaigns sit on a very unique middle ground.

They can simulate the human-nature of click-to-call campaigns, without requiring any actual human agents, like a lead capture form.

Book a slot with a Tars expert to see how chatbots can increase your conversion rate by 50%

Arnav is the Director of Content Marketing at Tars. He spends most days building bots, writing about conversational design and scrolling through Giphy’s trending section looking for the gifs that go into the Tars Newsletter.